


The Tailed Lodger

by Prochytes



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-16
Packaged: 2018-04-26 15:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5009416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Rome, a fallen detective crosses paths with a fallen secret agent. There follows a hunt for a king, and a whispered tiger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tailed Lodger

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D_ to 1x09 “Repairs” and _Sherlock_ to 3x01 “The Empty Hearse”. This takes place between S2 and S3 of _Sherlock_ , but a long time pre-series for _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D_ (thanks to the elasticity of Marvel Time). Deeply indebted, of course, to the Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger”; there are also spoilers for “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” . Angst and violence. Originally posted on LJ in 2015.

1\. Roman Holiday.

The stone seraphs of the Tiber know a good fence. They stand on Ponte Sant’Angelo, in brazen possession of stolen goods. The lance, the sponge, the crown of thorns – all are present and correct in their marble grasp, flogged to them cheap, no doubt, by a bloke in a pub who swore blind that the swag had fallen off the back of a crucifixion. Cradled in their arms is every collectible from Calvary that wasn’t nailed down. And the nails, as well. 

For all the patent celestial larceny of the bridge, the adjoining area, around the base of Castel Sant’Angelo, is the spot for anyone who wishes to study mankind, or to buy pseudonymous leather goods. To and fro the tourists trot, trailing clouds of glory and malfeasance ( _stock-broker; stamp-collector; adulterer_ ). A fit place, then, for a dead detective to keep in practice ( _journalist; loft-conversion; three dogs_ ), while contemplating the problem of The Sahara King, and the whispered Tiger ( _engineer; paint-baller; expectant mother_ ).

Beyond a doubt, there was a certain urgency to the problem ( _temp; gluten allergy; unemployed brother_ ). That, the exiguous data had made plain ( _??????_ ). Which rendered it all the more imperative that…

Stop. Scroll back. 

_??????_

Hmmm.

_??????_

A small woman of Asian ancestry, in early middle age, was walking quickly towards Via della Concilazione. She wore a trouser-suit and sensible shoes. Everything about her was punctiliously unremarkable. While he watched, she stopped for a moment, as if undecided. But then she resumed her swift course, and soon the crowds of the pious and the laden, Vatican-bound, hid from view the dullest woman he had ever seen with clothes on. 

This left him with a choice to make. On the one hand, The Sahara King was a matter of international importance, on which the fate of continents blah blah blah. On the other, that vision of immaculate tedium was easily the most interesting thing he had seen in months. It wasn’t even a choice, really. And flexitime was a signal advantage of any afterlife.

He loped in the direction where he had last spotted her. 

***

He caught sight of her again as she was turning into Via della Traspontina. She headed north through Borgo, into Prati. Once there, she walked along Via Cola di Rienzo, before turning into a courtyard that opened onto that street. From the courtyard, he saw her climb the stairs to a door on the first floor. There she disappeared from sight, into what the signs around the courtyard made it clear was a rented apartment.

After an hour and a half, she came out again, enforcing a brief sojourn, on his part, behind a quantity of convenient verdure until she passed. He watched her re-emerge onto Via Cola di Rienzo, and vanish into a nearby late-opening department store. Time spent by the average consumer in a given visit to a department store is substantially in excess of that for a newsagent’s or a chemist’s. More than enough of a window, then, for a spot of house-breaking.

The front door was boring, and did not long detain him. The ingenuousness or parsimony of Roman landlords balked, apparently, at much investment in locks. He opened the door. 

The seconds that followed were crowded and bothersome. 

“Phnnnghh,” he said authoritatively, “mnethempffh.” The gravitas of this pronouncement was, in his view, a minor triumph, given the current challenges to elocution. 

“Why are you tailing me?”

“Fnear.”

She sighed, and relented a little of the pressure from her left hand which was holding his face against the door. The pressure from her right, which was pinning his arm behind his back, showed no conspicuous inclination to follow suit. “Speak.”

“Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “I should really have seen that coming. Into the department store and out again after, let’s say, a count of a hundred, then parkour to this apartment’s exterior balcony. Fair number of passers-by on Via Cola di Rienzo, even this late in the day, so you were taking a calculated risk of being seen, but, as you’ve just demonstrated,” he probed a tooth with his tongue to make sure that she hadn’t punched it loose, “you enjoy considerable resources of agility and speed. I don’t imagine that you found it much of a challenge to evade detection.”

“I should give you lessons, clearly.” Her right hand shivered the promise of dislocation into his elbow. He was impressed. Controlled hyper-extension, like a good soufflé, demands a gossamer touch. “Answer the question.”

“I saw you outside Castel Sant’Angelo. You were dull. Abundantly so. Extravagantly so.”

There was a calculated stillness at his back. “I’m no one special.”

“Wrong. You’re no one. That’s special. It’s impossible to look that dull without putting work into it. You’d filed the serial numbers off your soul. Which, to a man like me, suggests the question: what’s behind that veil of mediocrity that you’re scared of letting anybody see?”

Continued stillness. 

“Of course, your decision to ambush me was a godsend…”

“Yeah.” Even with the slackened pressure, the texture of the door was rough against his face. "You’ve got me exactly where you want me.”

“… because every weapon gives itself away in use. A gun. A knife. A shield.”

Just the faintest, eloquent quiver in her grip. “A shield’s not a weapon.”

“Depends who’s throwing it. How many different martial arts did you break out in our brawl just now? Six?”

“It’s a scary world. And everyone needs a hobby.”

“A scary world makes people carry mace, or socks filled with coins. Six martial arts means that it’s the world that should be scared.”

A pause. “You know nothing about me.”

“Don’t I? A spy, patently. You could scarcely be otherwise, with that knack for boredom punctuated by violence. But if you were on assignment, you’d be planting tells rather than uprooting them. That’s not a spy who’s working. That’s a spy who’s _hiding_.”

Most people cannot maintain a consistent grip for any extended period, especially when they are distracted by a monologue. His interlocutor was not most people. His arm remained in a grip like steel, or one of those exotic alloys that had been seeping out of Wakanda lately on which he had once been tempted to write a blog post. He took a breath, and continued: 

“You’ve dropped off the grid. I’d conjecture that that’s the result of the botched mission about eight months ago in which you sustained the gun-shot wound to your leg. It’s healed up well – congratulations on that – but the slight residual damage is more obvious when you’re kicking than when you’re walking. The failure of that mission, I would hypothesize, led to the self-medication with whisky, which, if you don’t mind my saying, or even if you do, frankly, is getting just a little out of control. You still have enough self-respect to dispose of the empties, but the splatter patterns on the carpet are quite suggestive: three on the right side of the bed, two on the left, and four by the table. I’d point them out to you, but, for some reason, I’m having a bit of trouble moving my head at the moment.

“So, yes, drunk hiding burnt-out spy, I do know just a little bit about you now. If you’re planning to kill me because of that, I think it only fair to warn you that I’m dead already.” 

A steep moment of silence. Then, all the pressure on his head and arm was gone. He began to turn from the door in an unthreatening manner; realized that “threatening” wasn’t exactly within his ambit of possibility right now; and therefore completed the turn with expedition.

She was watching him with dark appraising eyes. John (indulging that displeasing turn towards astronomical imagery which his blogger had sometimes affected just to be annoying ever since that business with the Van Buren supernova and the fake Vermeer) might have said that she looked like Mercury. She was small; she was remote; and he had had exactly zero success in landing anything useful on her. 

Almost a minute passed before she spoke again. 

“You’re from London,” she said. “You could have picked up your Western boxing moves anywhere. But, these days, they only teach that lame-assed florid Jiu-Jitsu variant…”

“Actually, Baritsu has a long and disting….”

“… in London.” Another contemplative silence. “You noticed every detail of this room, while I was kicking your ass. Word is that there have only ever been two men on Earth with a brain like that, and the Ice Man doesn’t often travel.”

“Certainly not. In this climate, there’d be nothing left but a carrot and a puddle.”

“And so the field narrows to one.” She looked him up and down again. “You’re a long way from Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes.”

2\. The Lady, or the Tiger?

“They say you threw yourself off a hospital roof in London,” she continued.

“‘They’ say a lot of things.”

“They say you did it because you were a fraud.”

Her eyes were searching out whether that had stung. He shrugged. “Rinse; repeat.”

“My agency followed the chatter about you. You were a dick.” 

“Detective, actually. The world’s only consulting detective.”

“That as well.” She sat down on the bed. “Why are you in Rome, Sherlock Holmes? Besides the opportunities for casual stalking and having your butt handed to you.” 

“The Sahara King.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Explain.”

“Come now, Agent Boring. After all this unaccustomed honesty on my part, I think that I’ve earned some reciprocal illumination.” He stretched. “What do they call you?”

Her eyes flickered. “My name is Melinda May.”

“Indeed? My friend John would already be half in love with you by now: cheek-bones; shorter than him; and alliteration. You’re probably not familiar with his blog. _The Seventh Smudge. The Solitary Psychopath_. The man can scarcely see an initial phoneme without trying to clone it.” 

“Hmm. I’ve known you for less than five minutes. The idea of your having a friend already gives me trouble.”

“It’s atypical that you punched me in the face before I started talking. That usually happens the other way around.”

“I don’t doubt it. Who is The Sahara King?”

“There’s the genius and the wonder of the thing. No one knows.”

“Not even you?”

“Not even I, though I am closer than any has ever been. May I sit without risking retribution?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Thank you.” He lounged back in the room’s sole, threadbare chair. “I had an enemy: the late Jim Moriarty, of pathological celebrity. He masqueraded as a TV moron. I imagine that your agency knows now that that was not so?”

She nodded. 

“Moriarty’s criminal empire was one of unexampled cunning and extent. I’ve spent the last year travelling the world to roll it up. It rested upon extortion, robbery, data theft… every exquisite shade in the spectrum of human delinquency. But, as I have discovered, when Moriarty needed what I suppose those in your line of work might be inclined to call ‘wet-work’ done, he usually called upon The Sahara King.”

“An assassin?”

“ _The_ assassin. One entirely unknown to any intelligence service. The Sahara King only did work for Moriarty, and so, in comparison to such creatures as The Golem, was always a ghost. The files of Moriarty’s lesser minions – most of which are now in my possession – refer to this operative only by that title. No name; no picture; no physical description. Unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.”

“But the kills.” Her tone was still flat, unengaged. He wondered when last anything had been able to carve a peak or a valley from that voice. “There will have been scene-of-crime reports. And bodies.”

“True. But The King’s artisanal wet-work was tailored to a secretive demographic. By my count, at least eight killings in the most elevated diplomatic and society circles across three continents can be laid at The King’s door in the last half a decade. All were most effectually concealed. Students of criminology will recall the unexplained ‘withdrawal’ from public life of Jean Dupont, the French Ambassador in Transia, three years since, or the ‘disappearance’ of James Phillimore in…”

“Are there pictures?”

He scowled for a moment, but decided to change tack. “One or two. I’m reaching into my coat. I’m telling you that as a courtesy. You probably couldn’t kill me before I removed the envelope. ”

“Is that a challenge?”

He took a dog-eared envelope from his inside pocket, and spread photographs and print-outs on the coffee-table. “Their quality leaves much to be desired.” 

She picked up a print in which the field was occupied almost wholly by the image of a forearm on a carpet. Four bruises purpled on its pallid bulk. “I can see that.” 

“The desultory reportage of the crimes did furnish one further clue.”

“Which was…?”

“A word. The penultimate victim was an Irishwoman, Mary Sykes.”

“The politician?”

“That’s the one. Did you know her?”

“We met once or twice.” She put down the photograph, and picked up a print-out. “Sykes was tough. Ex-military. If she was killed, she wouldn’t have gone down easy.”

“She didn’t. That crime was only a qualified success for The Sahara King. As far as I have been able to gather via… unorthodox diplomatic channels, Sykes was discovered, beaten to the point of death, in a room that appeared to have been wrecked in an extended brawl. Before she died of her injuries in the ambulance, she managed to get out a single word. ‘Tiger.’”

“‘Tiger.’ That’s all you had to go on?”

“Not quite. While the evidence as to the crimes themselves was nugatory, I did have the files that I had liberated from Moriarty’s network. From those, I pieced together that The Sahara King, between jobs, is resident in Rome. As you can see from those sheets, I even know the approximate lay-out of The King’s own base, and details of its security dispositions. What I don’t know – yet – is how to find it in a city of 2.9 million people that isn’t London.”

“I see. Sounds like you have a problem.”

“I’m sure that the application of my considerable intellect will sort it out.” 

“Really? I’m not.” Melinda May walked into the other room, and returned holding a half-empty bottle of cheap whisky. She sat again on the bed, and took a swig from the bottle. “I knew a man a lot like you once, in New York. He was a surgeon. I met him through my… Well, it doesn’t matter how I met him. Brilliant, they told me. Certainly as arrogant as all hell. He lost his motor skills in a car accident. The last time I saw him, he was a drunk. That’s what comes from being a saviour who can’t save. “

She took another swig from the bottle. “Good luck with your hunt, Sherlock Holmes. Now walk out of this room, and keep on walking. Tell anyone that you saw me here, and that’ll be the last thing you ever say.”

“Right.” He levered himself to his feet. “Since we’ve reached the ‘empty threats’ stage of the evening, it’s probably time for me to be on my way. I’ll just…”

His legs chose this particularly irritating moment to buckle beneath him.

Even outside combat, and at least two stiff doubles of whisky down, her speed was unnerving. Within a sliver of a second, she was across the room and supporting his weight. She decanted him back into the chair, and resumed her former scrutiny.

“How long since you last ate?” she asked. 

“Um…. Fairly sure that that was the day before yesterday.”

“Or slept beneath a roof?”

“Today’s Thursday, isn’t it? Then that would be… er…. June.”

She sighed. “There’s food.” She pointed at bread and cuts of salami, stacked on a shelf, which he had already recognized as coming from the delicatessen further down Via Cola di Rienzo. “There’s drink.” She gestured at the whisky. “You can sleep here overnight. Be on your way in the morning.”

“Thank you. I’m sure you’ll agree that, in light of my longer spine, and my recent deprivations, it makes sense that I should have the bed.”

In the event, the floor was perfectly comfortable. 

***

He opened his eyes in the morning, and the following facts trooped in:

(1) The window was open.

(2) Melinda May was no longer in the apartment. 

(3) The envelope containing his photos and print-outs was not visible. 

There was no especial virtue in keeping his eyes open for what came next, so he shut them again. 

He was galled that she had been able to leave without waking him. (Melinda May was quieter awake than asleep. The thought seemed to him significant, in a way that he had yet to determine. He set it aside for further consideration.) Once, only Mycroft had ever oppressed him with a sense of stint to his abilities. Jim Moriarty had changed that. Clamped a scold’s bridle around his head, reminding all the world what he couldn’t do. 

The metaphor conveyed no advantage; he forgot it. May’s behaviour was another matter. It opened up excellent opportunities to hunt a tiger and find a King.

And where better to seek a King, than in a Palace?

He forsook, this time, the vaulted chambers of his mnemonic menagerie: the red leech; the trained cormorant; the murderous race-horse; the remarkable worm. The Lion’s Mane waved forlorn to an empty hall. Onward, now, to other rooms, where the reek of dung and the tang of sea-salt gave way to chalk and leather and sweat and the kind of claret that you want to tap but you certainly wouldn’t want to drink. He didn’t find much there. But he found enough.

Behind his eye-lids, he unfurled and scrutinized the plans of the only property that met the revised criteria. Indeed. Not so very challenging, after al…

Wait. That made no sense. 

He ran the scenario again. And again. And again. Every permutation returned the same result. 

He hissed. Again. _I need to think…_

The problem with a mind palace is that not even the most vigilant landlord can altogether escape the occasional cowboy decorator. Before he was on top of it, profitless memories skittered across the bright imagined stone. _You machine. Sod this. Sod this. You stay here if you want. On your own._

Irrelevant and distracting. He needed to focus.

Unless….

Melinda May had spoken in her sleep. Her mutterings had been loud, and an impediment to the somnolence of others, and generally rather tedious and repetitive. But John would have wanted to know what she had said. Sherlock’s grasp of the Chinese dialects was far from perfect, being derived largely from sixteen hours with a mildewed copy of _Jin Ping Mei_ while hiding in a loft from the Butcher of Beijing. But he could make a reasonable stab at what May had been sharing with the Roman night: _Murder. Murder. You cruel beast. You monster._

And there was the answer. He had modelled the problem with the wrong victory condition; that was all. His eyes snapped open; he clambered to his feet. 

Time to solve the crime. And save the life. 

3\. The Time of the Angels.

The edges of objects chafed against each other in her field of vision, and her ears were ringing. At least the concussion blurred the pain from the cracked rib. Swings and roundabouts.

Footsteps in the corridor outside heralded the end-game. She braced herself against the wall that was supporting her weight; her finger twitched on the stolen smartphone. Just a little longer…

Light from the open door knifed her eyes. For a moment, all that she could see there was an aureole of dark curls. Then the image resolved, into a tall pale man holding a whisky bottle. She sighed, and took her finger off the ’phone.

“ _Buon giorno_ , Agent May,” Sherlock Holmes stepped across the threshold. He held up the whisky. “I brought breakfast. Although,” he scrutinized the bottle for a moment, “you might want to give it a wipe for hair and blood deposits first. I had to improvise when I overtook the reinforcements on my way in.”

“How did you find this place?”

“I’m very, very good.”

“Last night, you didn’t know where it was. And you can’t have found out anything new this morning.”

“But I did. I found out that _you_ had worked out where it was. That, in itself, was a fresh datum.”

“Maybe I’m just smarter than you.”

“Please. Let’s try to keep this within the boundaries of rational conjecture.” He sat down beside her, echoing her posture, with his back propped against the wall. “You had no more data about the case itself than I did. I know for a fact that The Sahara King was unknown to the _soi-disant_ ‘intelligence’ community. The obvious question, then, was this: what additional expertise were you able to bring to bear? What do you know better than I?”

“How long have you got? I could make a list.”

“John made a list. John did a blog-post, actually: _Sherlock Holmes – His Limits_. It was offensively popular. But in this case I had no need for lengthy speculation, because last night made the principal arena in which you surpass me painfully clear. And I do mean ‘painfully’.

“Fighting styles sing to you. They are your personal friends, as the positive integers were to Ramanujan, as the soils of London are to me. You saw in the photos what Mary Sykes saw before she died. You saw the Tiger.

“What is a ‘tiger’? It can be so many things. That’s the problem; it’s hard to narrow it down. The largest cat species, _Panthera tigris_. A poem by William Blake, quoted to death by every bargain-basement psychopath afflicted by delusions of literary merit. But also something else. May I see your right arm?”

She held it out, wordlessly. Between her wrist and elbow, four bruises were already constellating beneath the skin.

“When I saw the photo of that wound on Phillimore, I dismissed it as an epiphenomenon of the murder. Plenty of killers end up grabbing at their victims, one way or another. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It’s not an accident of the struggle…”

“It’s a signature move.” Melinda May withdrew her forearm. “In Classic Tiger Kung Fu. You hold your fingers curled like claws, so that it’s easier to grab your opponent’s arm.”

“Indeed. As you know, more than a hundred buildings in this city filled my original criteria for the base. Far too many for me to search within any reasonable time-frame. But only one of those was contiguous with a dojo that taught Classic Tiger Kung Fu. Only one of them housed The Sahara King. I take it that she’s the one over there?”

“She is.”

He rose, and walked over to the recumbent form of a woman in her early thirties. He stood, and breathed in the data: 1.72 m. ; 67.5 kg.; muscular development on the arms, shoulders, and legs consistent with a professional martial artist. The visible extent of her present injuries made him thankful that Melinda May could set to “stun”. “Who is she?”

“Her name is Cecilia Rossi.” May had not moved from the wall. “Her grandfather was Libyan, I think.”

“I see. Hence ‘The Sahara King’.”

“I knew that she was a world-class fighter. I didn’t know that she was an assassin. But there was always talk.”

“There often is. Dark rumours gather, even around the careful ones. I see that she’s still breathing.”

“Just about. She was good – very good. I couldn’t afford to go easy. She’ll need medical attention to pull through.”

“Let’s not hurry.” He turned on his heel. “I imagine that you walked in here and told her that you knew her secret? Challenged her one-on-one?”

“She almost beat me. But not quite.” May shifted her shoulders. “Winning’s a habit I find hard to break.”

“Yes. Forgetfulness of that possibility was the mistake that almost undid all my deductions.”

Her eyes were wary. “What do you mean?”

“I knew where you were heading as soon as I woke up. But your strategy seemed to confound all rational calculation. You might reasonably have fancied your chances against The Sahara King. But you knew from my files that any attempt to compromise the demesne of Moriarty’s lieutenant would automatically trigger the deployment of reinforcements. As soon as you walked into this room, the clock was ticking.

“The mechanism could not be evaded. You’re on the outs with your agency, so you wouldn’t have had back-up of your own. How could you best an assassin very nearly the equal of yourself and not be so weakened by the encounter that the reinforcements would be too much for you? I ran seventeen possible scenarios. In not one of them did you survive. It was… infuriating. Until I saw what John would have seen in a moment. 

“I couldn’t find the exit strategy because there wasn’t one. I’d become so wrapped up in analysing what Melinda May could do that I’d forgotten to consider what she couldn’t.”

Her gaze had not wavered. “Go on.”

“You can’t allow yourself to perish without a cause. And, no matter how far you’ve sunk, you just can’t make yourself throw a fight. Those two rules were tearing you apart. The Sahara King handed you the perfect opportunity: to do one last piece of good; to fight as hard as you could; and then to die. The local police are summoned – I imagine that that’s the number you were about to dial as I came in? – and they arrive just in time to find a pair of desperate flunkies trying to clean the scene; one unconscious master criminal; a wealth of material evidence pointing to the solution of a dozen crimes; and a dead, nameless woman in a trouser-suit.

“Melinda May’s solution to the Final Problem. I must commend you on the elegance of your helpmate.”

“And it would have worked,” she held up her hand for the whisky, which he passed down, “if Sherlock Holmes didn’t have to be a hero.”

He frowned. “There’s no such thing.”

“My best friend believes in heroes.” She swallowed a slug of whisky, and closed her eyes. “I’ve told him often that it’s an old-fashioned notion.”

“It’s a moronic notion. I hope that your agency doesn’t let him out without a carer.” He watched as she set the bottle down beside her. “Might I venture an observation, Melinda May?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then be my guest.”

“A woman of your manifest resources wouldn’t have any trouble engineering a situation like this again. Beowulf can always find the necessary dragon. But I think that the world is both a safer and a less boring place with you in it, and that that is a paradox not lightly to be set aside. I think that you should go back to your moronic friend who believes in heroes, because you’re the closest thing to one he will ever see. 

“Your life is not your own, Melinda May. Keep your hands off it.”

“That’s not your call to make.”

“I know.” He sat down once more beside her. “You never answered my first question.”

“I told you that my name was Melinda May.”

“Yes. But the question I asked was: ‘What do they call you?’”

A long pause. “They call me The Cavalry.” 

“I see.” He picked up the whisky. “The business in London, that you mentioned. I… I made a mistake. I underestimated madness. Didn’t see its face until too late. I still won, of course. Like you, I’m a creature of habit. But my mistake meant that the associated costs of that victory were… greater than I would have wished. And so we are immured alike in our contrasting reputations. The dead fraud, and the live Cavalry.” He looked again at the bottle. “Perhaps we should just jack it all in and become super-villains.”

She snorted. “You don’t have the right stuff for that gig. You’d need an island-base, a super-weapon, and a stupid hat.”

“I do, as it happens, own a stupid hat. But it’s in London, and, technically, it’s part of my estate. Being dead isn’t all sunshine and roses.” He sighed. “Well, pair of pathological winners that we are, I suppose that we’d better make a start of gift-wrapping this crime-scene for the local constabulary.”

“I suppose we better had.”

***

They met again at Castel Sant’Angelo, eight days later. She wore the familiar trouser-suit, though a certain circumspection in her movements betrayed the strapped ribs beneath. There was a tablet tucked under her elbow.

“Back behind the shield again, I see,” he said.

“Extraction is in three hours. After that, disciplinary, and probably paper-work. A lot of paper-work.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Far below, the Tiber was an emerald serpent, prodigal with gleams. “Will you be looking for another dragon?”

She was still for a moment before she answered. “Maybe. But not today. What’s next for you?”

“The files that we looted from Signora Rossi’s hard-drive were most illuminating. I must hurry to an appointment in Belgrade. With Baron Maupertuis.”

“Maupertuis. He’s on several watch-lists.” She glanced sideways at his face. “What’s the exit strategy?”

“Hmm? Oh, no doubt something will occur to me. I am, after all, remarkably clever. It’s possible that I’ve already mentioned that.”

“It’s slipped out once or twice.” She removed the tablet from under her elbow, and waked it with a tap. “I have something to show you. Your brother gave his permission.”

Melinda May’s dextrous fingers shepherded the photos across the screen. Background detail told him that they had been taken in the course of the last week. A young woman wrapped in a white lab-coat, eating an M&S sandwich at the entrance to St. Bart’s, and using the carton to catch the snowing crumbs. A man with silvering brown hair, elbows on the table at a press-conference . An old-age pensioner, lips pursed, weighing the gambit of discounted meats at the delicatessen counter in a Waitrose.

A short man, in a cardigan, on the Central Line, looking at a _Metro_ without reading it.

“Your life is not your own, Sherlock Holmes.” Melinda May put the tablet back beneath her arm. “Keep your hands off it.”

He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

She nodded. He stepped back, as a crocodile of determined Belgians marched between them. When the procession was over, she was gone. He counted seven easy ways to effect that vanish; the current state of her ribs cut the total down to three. As a professional courtesy, he left it at that. 

He walked the perimeter, thinking about the Serbian. Above, Michael the Archangel drew his sword against the indifferent blue. 

FINIS


End file.
